Video Background

On February 4th 2004 in Stamford Connecticut, CoolTea hosted a business networking event that was a "Sneak Preview Event" for that year's upcoming Director's View Film Festival (DVFF).

This video was created as part of the event promo to build buzz and awareness hence you can watch (in order of appearance) Bruce Vilanch, Tracey Pollen, Sean Connery, Hal Holbrook, Liz Smith, and Christopher Walken share their thoughts on why independent film festivals, like DVFF, are important to the film industry.

Unfortunately, the quality of this video degrades toward the end with seemingly random color boxes of noise. My hard drive crashed that stored this video project hence I suspect these visual-noise elements resulted from parts of the drive that gave out.

Even the original footage was that was digitized from BETA tape was also corrupted by the failed drive so there is no way to recreate the project sans visual noise but I was able to save this 456 meg avi file that you see here.

I should also mention that at the time, this was before video hosting sites like Youtube, Blip.tv, Vimeo, etc. were as popular as they are today, so CoolTea hosted and streamed compressed versions of this video at much lower resolution.

Thus back then, part of the art was with web-compression in getting a file like this avi file to work well as a 3-6 meg real media, mov, wmv, and mp4 file - which we did.

Notes About the DVFF and CoolTea Film Festivals

The DVFF was popular in the lower Fairfield Connecticut region for a couple years (Norwalk, Stamford, Greenwich) as were CoolTea events.

At some point, the DVFF decided to leave Connecticut and move to New York City - my understanding is that they wanted to leverage the energy building in the city for the then burgeoning Tribeca Film Festival.

Since CoolTea events at that time were centric to Fairfield-Westchester Counties, it was around then that I lost touch with Robert Kesten, DVFF founder, and at the time of this video upload here on Archive.org no longer recognize his web site - dvff.org - nor could I confirm he is still involved with the site. Thus no endorsement for said site is expressed or implied - only that said URL was part of the original video you see here.

I should also mention that around the same time, CoolTea partnered with other film festivals - some of which are also no longer on the map per their original essence - e.g., John Carley's Greenwich Film Festival - which was also wildly respected in its day.

Too bad. It was an honor to have been an event partner with both these film festivals and times change so when recently going thru my digital library, I decided to upload this DVFF video here on Archive.org for future generation consideration.

Speaking for myself, we had fun and hundreds of our CoolTea event customers will probably concur.

Several of our CoolTea event photos even made the local press including one featuring my wife that was picked up by high-society magazine but since they never sent me the promised copy of that edition they published, I will not honor their name - shame on them and they know who they are but I digress!

At some point I might elaborate more on those film festival events during those years and if I do, they will be on ChuckingIt.com.


This movie is part of the collection: Community Video

Director: Daniel Cooperby
Producer: ChuckScott.com
Sponsor: The Director's View
Audio/Visual: sound, color
Language: English
Keywords: CoolTea, DVFF, Directors View Film Festival
Contact Information: Chuck Scott at http://chuckingit.com

Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States

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Credits

Director = Daniel Cooperby
Executive Producer = Robert Kesten
Producer = Diane Longo
Camera = Brad Corbelli, David Orr
Music = Chuck Scott
Special Effect = Chuck Scott
Special Thanks (in order of appearance): Bruce Vilanch, Tracey Pollen, Sean Connery, Hal Holbrook, Liz Smith, Christopher Walken